Why Teiresias is a powerful seer

Teiresias was a priest of Zeus, and as a young man he encountered two snakes mating and hit them with a stick. He was then transformed into a woman.As a woman, Teiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto. Tiresias's background was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. Greek mythology contained other hermaphroditic figures (including Hermaphroditus), but Tiresias was fully male and then fully female. Also, prophecy was a gift given only to the priests and priestesses. Therefore, Teiresias offered Zeus and Hera evidence and gained the gift of male and female priestly prophecy.

As a seer, Teiresias was regarded as inerrant. In Greek literature, Teiresias's pronouncements are always gnomic but never wrong. He is generally extremely reluctant to offer his visions like most Oracles. Often when his name is attached to a mythic prophecy, it is introduced simply to supply a personality to the generic example of a seer. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus, the king of Thebes, calls upon Teiresias to aid in the investigation of the killing of the previous king Laios. At first, Teiresias refuses to give a direct answer and instead hints that the killer is someone Oedipus really does not wish to find. However, after being provoked to anger by Oedipus' accusation first that he has no foresight and then that Teiresias had had a hand in the murder, he reveals that in fact it was Oedipus himself who had committed the crime. Outraged, Oedipus throws him out of the palace, but then afterwards realises the truth. Thus, Teiresias was seen as a powerful seer because the downfall of the mighty Oedipus was seen by Teiresias.

Live Stage Performance

Watching a live stage performance is not something new to me. I was exposed to watching theatre since I was in secondary school. The first theatre that I watched is when I was in Form 3 in University of Science, Malaysia.

Watching a live stage performance differs from watching the movies or the television. To me, I enjoy watching theater more because the actions are live and there is no room for mistakes. In a television shows, you can make mistakes and the director can just simple cut and edit the faulty scene. Unfortunately, any directors of live stage performance won’t be able to do that. You can’t simple cut and edit a live performance!

Every time when you watch a live performance, even it is the same play, the sensational feeling and the perception of the play differs. This is because every time the actor and actresses are performing, the acting couldn’t be the same as it is a live performance. That is why to me, watching the live stage performance is much more interesting than watching movies because the feeling are real, and when there is a mistake or error in the performance, it is up to the actors and actresses to cover up their mistakes.

Perception of human's life

Human’s life is a cycle. In the “Four Ages of Man’, the poem explains how human’s life is actually a cycle that is predictable. We started out as a baby, pure and without any knowledge of anything about the world. Then when we became teenagers, we started to loose something. In the end, the poem states that “God shall wins’ which mean all of us will die eventually.

In the Sophocles’s riddle, it also stated about human’s growth. When you are a baby and still young, you will crawl. As you grow older, you will walk on your own feet. When it comes to the time when you are old, you will need to use a cane in order for you to walk properly.

Life’s Brief Candle also explains how man acts as an actor in this world and how the world is actually a big stage. Human’s life is just a cycle from the day that we were born. It is like a tunnel where the end of it the light that awaits us is Death itself.

Personally, I prefer he idea that was presented in the “Four Ages of Man”. Our life is very meaningful, even though we knew that one day God will win over us, we should not waste the life that He has given to us.

Reflectional on the Greek theatre

During the second class of the subject, I was introduced to the history of theatre. The handout that was given basically tells me more about what theater is all about.

In the first lesson, we were introduced to types of theatre, for example Greek theatre, Roman theatre, Medieval theatre and Restoration Drama. That was a lot of theatres. I didn’t know at first that theatres are divided into categories and era. What I know was theatre is just a theatre; a stage play performs by actors and actresses. I didn’t know that different types of theatres presenting different themes.

We also learned that in a tragedy theatre, it is just not tragedy; there are also a few types of tragedy. Apart from that, we were introduced to the dramatic and epic theatre, conventions of theatre and the stage characters. All of these things bring a different view and perception to the definition of theatre that I had in mind.

Before the class, I couldn’t imagine what I will earn about theatre in this drama class. Is it just reading and performing plays? Well, most likely I will need to read lots of plays and perhaps might need to perform one. It never occurs to my mind that drama is not just about reading the play. It is about understanding the whole play, including the stage directions and the performers.

Reflectional of Questionaire

When I first entered the class of Teaching the Language of Drama this semester, I had in my mind that this class might be as difficult or more difficult as Teaching The Language of Short Stories. I was a little bit anxious and nervous to get started with the subject as literature is definitely not my favourite subject.

During the first class what Dr. Edwin did was a kind of post-mortem o Teaching The Language of Short Stories. He gave us some reflectional questions on the previous subject to recall how much that we have learned or perhaps how much did we actually remember.

After completing the questions, then I realized that I don’t remember that much of the previous subject and I begin to wonder what the connection of these two subjects is. After the class ended, we discussed among us about the questions and it turned out that many of us did not remember much also. Well, it is obvious that we study just for the examination purpose, not the real life purpose. Perhaps after this we need to pay more attention to the lectures and make sure that we do remember the facts for real life usage, not just for the sake of examination.